This is going to be awkward.

In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions, your favorite philosophical trio—Leigh Johnson, Rick Lee, and Talia Bettcher—dive headfirst into the squirmy, complicated world of cringe. From wedding speeches gone wrong to tone-deaf icebreaker confessions, they unpack the peculiar affective cocktail we experience when someone’s self-presentation dramatically misfires. Cringe isn’t just about secondhand embarrassment—it’s a visceral, full-body response that blends aesthetic, moral, and even ontological dissonance.

Leigh kicks off the discussion by proposing that cringe moments represent aesthetic failures that are rarely just personal—they feel universal. Drawing on Kant, Foucault, Butler, and even Kierkegaard, the hosts unpack how cringe exposes the fragile choreography of our social performances. Talia and Rick help flesh out how laughter at cringe can be a nervous coping mechanism, an act of social policing, or even a weird kind of solidarity. Whether it’s Succession’s Kendall Roy, real-life icebreaker disasters, or awkward philosophical conference moments, they ask what makes cringe feel so charged—and sometimes so politically consequential.

Ultimately, this episode suggests that cringe is a kind of social flare-up: a breakdown in dialogical flow, a misfire in performance, a moment when norms wobble and the audience winces. But it’s also a space for critique. Who gets to decide what’s cringe and why? Is labeling something as cringe always an act of control, or can it sometimes challenge the boundaries of the “we” who makes those rules? This episode may be uncomfortable, but it’ll definitely leave you thinking—and maybe cringing at your past self just a little less harshly.

References and further readings

• Succession (Television series, HBOMax)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887)
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
• J.D. Vance orders donuts